#5 Article in Visual Studio Magazine for 2013

Greg Shackles and I write the Cross Platform in C# column for Visual Studio Magazine. This column started in January 2012 with an email from Keith Ward regarding my interest in a monthly column on what was then called Mono for Android. He had seen several of my articles already (I'm shocked he was interested because he HAD seen the articles) and had seen a good number of page views associated with them. First off, I was pleasantly surprised. It is an honor to have anyone think highly enough to want a guy that failed english in high school to want to write a column. Secondly, I had to think on this for a while. My friend Doug Turnure had asked me about joining a secret project at Microsoft to pump up the number of Windows 8 apps at launch. Thankfully, that did not happen, at least they did not want me on it. I never recieved any more info on it, so I just considered that they had enough people and weren't look for any more.

Thinking through the specifics of the column, I knew that I could not do everything. There would be times that I was off doing something and would not be available. I spoke to a few people, but Greg Shackles expressed the most interest. Greg was on board. In April, 2012, the first article was published. By the fall of 2012, I knew that the column needed to change to include MonoTouch for iOS. At the time, MT only supported MonoDevelop. We knew that the iOS Plugin for Visual Studio was coming (even though it was NDA at the time). About 10 days before the announcement of Xamarin 2.0 (with the iOS Plugin for VS, the name changes, and the product enhancements), we got the confirmation that the actual product would ship in late February. Unfortunately, due to things that our outside of our control, an article on the Xamarin.iOS Plugin for Visual Studio was not actually posted until April, 2013. It is that article that is the #5 article on the VSM web site in 2013. I assume that this is just for articles posted in 2013, but don't really know all of the specifics.

There are several groups that I would like to thank for this:

Keith Ward for the initial interest in the column.

The editors that have to read through my material. They make Greg and I look good.

Greg Shackles for being my co-author on the column. Greg and I work from a 2:1 split approximately on articles. Without Greg, I would not be able to do this continually and the column would probably not exist.

The folks at Xamarin. I know a good number of people there. I am friends with many of them. The reason I am friends with them is not because I somehow knew them before. I am friends with them becausebased on my background, they are solving the client's problems in a way that makes sense. These guys listen to the client and solve the problems that they can. That is what I want in a development tools partner! I especially want to thank Joseph Hill. He has always been helpful to me. He really has gone above and beyond what I would expect.